Bekker's Blog by Scott Bekker, Editor in Chief

Kaseya Launches Free Cloud Tools

Kaseya is embracing a freemium model to expand the customer base for its cloud services.

The remote monitoring and management tools vendor this week released a set of five SaaS IT tools that are free solutions for very specific IT headaches.

Kaseya goes to market in two ways -- mainly through its 6,000 partners, mostly managed services providers, and directly to corporate IT departments. Liz Lederer, senior vice president of Kaseya field marketing channel programs, said in an interview that the company believes the new tools will help MSP partners add net new customers.

"Having these free tools now is actually a great thing for our partners because our partners could use them as door openers or for planting the seeds with some of their customers. There could be just a particular problem that they're looking to solve. Or there could be a particular piece of our technology that they're looking to add into their portfolio of management solutions," Lederer said.

Gerald Beaulieu, vice president of product marketing at Kaseya, said the five SaaS IT tools are only an initial set and more will be coming.

"Our initial release is focused on auditing and security, because in many ways they kind of go hand in hand," Beaulieu said.

The immediately available tools are File Share Audit, User Audit, Software Audit, Security Audit and Windows Patch Management. All of the tools require only an e-mail address to set up and can be used to manage up to 1,000 computers.

"We're starting to carve out specific areas of our product that we can deliver to IT professionals or that our channel partners can sell ultimately to end customers that address specific pain points that they're having with those organizations," Beaulieu said.

"They may not need an entire platform to address the one issue. So what this does is it says, 'Hey, let's address that pain point through a tool.' It could be a free offering; it could be a paid offering. Get them in the family, let them see the benefits that we can offer, and then over time hopefully we can bring them up to our complete solution," he said. "And if not, if that one tool solves their pain point forever, then that's fine. So there will be some that will move up the stack and some that will stay."

The free tools use the same agent that Kaseya normally installs for its full RMM and other products, meaning that should customers chose to upgrade, it's just a matter of turning on the existing functionality, Beaulieu said.